Brief :
Create a great experience via a single portal to help the discovery and consumption of the Lloyds API portfolio and foster engagement with the API developer community at large. The first stage covers the internal clients and then progresses towards opening up to the external market.
Phase one: Enhanced feature delivery for internal Marketplace and laying building blocks for External Marketplace.
Design process: Discover - Define - Ideate - Design - Demo - Test
Discover
Business goals: As a UX lead it's essential to understand the business goals the multi-disciplinary team is working towards, it gives an idea of who the end user is and how they will benefit from the design solution.
Business goals
The Enterprise data team will see a 30-40 % reduction in the cost incurred for the subscription Journey.
LBG colleagues will have access to browse all the APIs available on the APIC internal gateway On SIT.
Reducing the market time for consumers
Encourage reusability of APIs within the bank
Competitor analysis: Took a look at how other businesses, banks, and global online service providers structure their APIs on their external sites. Especially interesting to see how they grouped the categories and how they worked on their information architecture. Is the industry striving towards standardisation of API groups and were all providers grouping their APIs in a similar fashion? Of course, the ones that caught my eye the most were the easy-to-use API sites, even a layman could understand the categorizations and could navigate the site with great ease.
Screenshots of competitor analysis
Design status: Reviewed the designs so far and investigated the reasons why they look the way they do and the constraints the previous team had faced, also was left unfinished, what was the brief then, and what the business goals were then. I was happy to find that there was some research previously done which gave some insight into the project and the end-users however the goals were very different earlier.
Define
Heuristic review: I conducted a heuristic usability review of the present designs and outlined the changes required in the design to enhance the usability of the site. I presented the report to the client and the multi-functional team I was a part of and outlined and prioritised the urgent design changes that are required to make the user experience more user-friendly.
Research plan: Put together a research plan outlining the needs for research, team involvement, time needed, users, objectives, discussion guides, and other resources needed to conduct sets of research interviews.
Discussion guide - snippet
Homepage:
What is your opinion about the navigation and drop-down menu?
What information do you think will be most helpful in the how it works section?
If you could choose a way of entering the site catalog what information model or path would you use?
Support do you find the information in the support section helpful?
User research findings: After interviewing a good number of users within and outside the bank and a couple of brainstorming workshops with the main stakeholder on the client side I started to put together a findings board and started to playback and create a wall where the team at large could get to know the user better and examine their needs.
Design system: I research what design systems we should be using for the project and worked collaboratively with the branding team to gain an understanding of the design systems available and the direction they are moving towards in terms of design.
Ideate
Although during this phase one needs to concentrate on sketching and designing it's essential to give visibility of the progress to the team so that red flags could have been raised.
Design: The information architecture of the navigation was revisited and the visual hierarchy and UI were worked up by me. based on the research finding I looked into designing the following:
Iterative designing -
Designing and demoing to the stakeholder and the team helped us reach our deadline and was able to deliver the design for productions.
Feedback incorporation and testing with internal clients, working collaboratively is essential at this juncture.
